Network Security 2023

https://docs.google.com/document/d/18SyaJJUBr055WaWQ0LvUHPKfB4ltZDqISJ7ZgIVmeNA

Network Security 2022

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o-jK86y2TBq7EertOeVWDklYS6AvnFY48XGNokaH3OQ/edi

Network Security 2021 Syllabus

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kHYHxSV_i5IMp0DwQK6DflQB_0s9-9iCMr6hDsIfUu8/edi

Informed consent and placebo effects: a content analysis of information leaflets to identify what clinical trial participants are told about placebos

BackgroundPlacebo groups are used in randomised clinical trials (RCTs) to control for placebo effects, which can be large. Participants in trials can misunderstand written information particularly regarding technical aspects of trial design such as randomisation; the adequacy of written information about placebos has not been explored. We aimed to identify what participants in major RCTs in the UK are told about placebos and their effects.Methods and FindingsWe conducted a content analysis of 45 Participant Information Leaflets (PILs) using quantitative and qualitative methodologies. PILs were obtained from trials on a major registry of current UK clinical trials (the UKCRN database). Eligible leaflets were received from 44 non-commercial trials but only 1 commercial trial. The main limitation is the low response rate (13.5%), but characteristics of included trials were broadly representative of all non-commercial trials on the database. 84% of PILs were for trials with 50:50 randomisation ratios yet in almost every comparison the target treatments were prioritized over the placebos. Placebos were referred to significantly less frequently than target treatments (7 vs. 27 mentions, p<001) and were significantly less likely than target treatments to be described as triggering either beneficial effects (1 vs. 45, p<001) or adverse effects (4 vs. 39, p<001). 8 PILs (18%) explicitly stated that the placebo treatment was either undesirable or ineffective.ConclusionsPILs from recent high quality clinical trials emphasise the benefits and adverse effects of the target treatment, while largely ignoring the possible effects of the placebo. Thus they provide incomplete and at times inaccurate information about placebos. Trial participants should be more fully informed about the health changes that they might experience from a placebo. To do otherwise jeopardises informed consent and is inconsistent with not only the science of placebos but also the fundamental rationale underpinning placebo controlled trials

Antidepressants and Advertising: Psychopharmaceuticals in Crisis

As the efficacy and science of psychopharmaceuticals has become increasingly uncertain, marketing of these drugs to both physicians and consumers continues to a central part of a multi-billion dollar per year industry in the United States. We explore how such drug marketing portrays idealized scientific relationships between psychopharmaceuticals and depression; how multiple stakeholders, including scientists, regulatory agencies, and patient advocacy groups, negotiate neurobiological explanations of mental illness; and how the placebo effect has become a critical issue in these debates, including the possible role of drug advertising to influence the placebo effect directly. We argue that if and how antidepressants “work” is not a straightforward objective question, but rather a larger social contest involving scientific debate, the political history of the pharmaceutical industry, cultural discourses surrounding the role of drugs in society, and the interpretive flexibility of personal experience.Histor

"I need a better description'': An Investigation Into User Expectations For Differential Privacy

Despite recent widespread deployment of differential privacy, relatively little is known about what users think of differential privacy. In this work, we seek to explore users' privacy expectations related to differential privacy. Specifically, we investigate (1) whether users care about the protections afforded by differential privacy, and (2) whether they are therefore more willing to share their data with differentially private systems. Further, we attempt to understand (3) users' privacy expectations of the differentially private systems they may encounter in practice and (4) their willingness to share data in such systems. To answer these questions, we use a series of rigorously conducted surveys (n=2424). We find that users care about the kinds of information leaks against which differential privacy protects and are more willing to share their private information when the risks of these leaks are less likely to happen. Additionally, we find that the ways in which differential privacy is described in-the-wild haphazardly set users' privacy expectations, which can be misleading depending on the deployment. We synthesize our results into a framework for understanding a user's willingness to share information with differentially private systems, which takes into account the interaction between the user's prior privacy concerns and how differential privacy is described

Placebos in 19th Century Medicine: A Quantitative Analysis of the BMJ

Objective: To provide the first quantitative data on the use of the term “placebo” in the 19th century. Design: Computer search of BMJ’s archival database from January 1840 (the first issue) through December 1899 for uses of the words “placebo(s).” Grounded theory was used to categorise the implications of uses of the term. Results: 71 citations contained the term “placebo(s).” Of these, 22 (31%) used the term to mean “no effect” or as a general pejorative term, 18 (25%) portrayed placebo treatment as permitting the unfolding of the natural history (the normal waxing and waning of illness), 14 (20%) described placebo as important to satisfy patients, 7 (10%) described it as fulfilling a physician’s performance role, 3 (4%) described its use to buy time, 3 (4%) described its use for financial gain, 2 (3%) used it in a manner similar to a placebo control, and only one implied that placebo could have a clinical effect. Only one citation mentioned telling the patient about his placebo treatment. Conclusion: Nineteenth century physicians had diverse a priori assumptions about placebos. These findings remind us that contemporary medicine needs to use rigorous science to separate fact from its own beliefs concerning the “provision of care.” As in previous generations, ethical issues concerning placebos continue to challenge medicine

New Applications Of Public Ledgers

The last decade and a half has seen the rise of a new class of systems loosely categorized as public ledgers. Public ledgers guarantee that all posted information is permanently available to the entire public. Common realizations of public ledgers include public blockchains and centralized logs. In this work we investigate novel applications of public ledgers. We begin by describing enclave ledger interaction, a computational method that allows the execution of trusted execution environments or cryptographically obfuscated programs to be conditioned on the contents of the ledger. We then show how this conditional execution paradigm can be used to achieve fairness in dishonest majority secure multiparty computation, which is impossible in the plain model. Finally, we show how conditional execution can be used to build systems that facilitate law enforcement access to ciphertext while ensuring robust transparency and accountability mechanisms